Alex Merced
Data Lakehouse & AI Thought Leader
Promoting empowerment through education, technology, and optimism. Alex is a Developer Advocate, Educator, and Author who has specialized in data engineering, open source (Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris), and developer education.
Who is Alex Merced?
A short introduction — the author, speaker, podcaster, and educator behind the work.
Developer Advocacy
Serving as Head of Developer Relations at Dremio, focusing on data engineering and open-source tech. Frequent speaker at events like Data Council, Confluent Current, and DataEngBytes.
Authorship
Author of "Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide", "Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide", and "Architecting an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse", along with 30+ other books on tech, economics, and fiction.
Educator
With over a decade of teaching economics and finance in NYC, and extensive experience instructing software engineering and web development.
Open data and agentic systems
My open-source work spans the data layer agents reason over and the portable contracts and runtimes that let them work. These are the current public releases and active development lines.
SencilloDB
A dependency-free embedded JSON document store with typed schemas, hardened transactions, atomic persistence, checksummed logs, diagnostics, repair, and selective shard writes.
IceFrame
A DataFrame-style Iceberg library. The 0.14 development line adds MCP 2.1, complete typing, stronger async and ingestion correctness, query explain, CDC, packaging, and security hardening.
Pangolin
A Rust Iceberg REST catalog with multi-tenancy, branching, RBAC, OIDC, encrypted warehouse credentials, audit logging, a management UI, two CLIs, and a Python SDK.
MagAgent
A terminal-native agent harness with persistent graph memory, 20+ model providers, 40 tools, sub-agents, AGS Level 3 execution, OAP profiles, gateways, and a local web workspace.
Loro
A governed agent harness with identity-bound approvals, policy, sandboxing, budgets, hash-chained audit, shared memory, channel gateways, AGS Level 3, OAP profiles, and a local web UI.
Merced AI
A local-first broker that discovers 14 installed agent harnesses and projects portable OAP bots onto them, with durable sessions, multi-bot conversations, and read-only AGS planning.
Open Agent Profile
Portable agent identity, authority, context, memory, and state deltas, with interoperable support libraries for Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, and Java.
Agentic Graph Specification
Portable bounded agentic work graphs with typed inputs and outputs, budgets, permissions, success criteria, planning, and shared support libraries across five languages.
📚 Knowledge Base
Explore a free library of 200+ in-depth articles covering Apache Iceberg, open table formats, data lakehouse architecture, data platforms (Dremio, Snowflake, Databricks, Trino), and AI engineering concepts — written as authoritative references for data engineers and architects.
Browse the Knowledge Base📺 Lakehouse & AI Show
Watch bite-sized video deep dives into Data Lakehouse architecture, open table formats, Apache Iceberg, and AI data systems.
Watch the Show🎙️ Listen to the Podcast
Join Alex Merced for deep dives into Data Engineering, open-source technology, and the future of the Data Lakehouse.
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